4 Things I Learned This Fall {2018}

Once again, I’m joining Emily Freeman and sharing a few things I learned over the last three months. Wheeee!

1. Puffball mushrooms are edible.

Have you ever found one of these quirky mushrooms growing in your back yard or maybe the park? They looks like balls of white bread dough rising at random on your lawn. They have no real stem, they’re just irregular spheres of fungus that grow right out of the ground. They pop up in our back yard every so often, and we always thought they were funny but didn’t think much of them.

Until I stumbled on a Facebook post where people were talking about eating them. I was intrigued and did some googling, and lo and behold: they’re edible! So the next time a bunch of puffball mushrooms appeared in our back yard, we gave them a try!

We picked the biggest ones, and I peeled them, sliced them up (they look like giant marshmallows from the inside!), and fried them in a bunch of butter. They’re really good! They have a very mild mushroom flavour, with a very soft texture — like soft tofu. I liked them best in my red curry. I love eating free food out of my back yard!

2. Red+green=yellow??? A.k.a. Mixing coloured light is completely different from mixing paint.

Did you guys know this? I did not know this, and I’m embarrassed that it took me 33 years to learn in.

Growing up, I was taught that there are three primary colours: red, blue, and yellow. You cannot make these colours from any other other colours. All other colours come from these colours. The end. Right?

I was vaguely aware that computers used RBG (red, blue and green) pixels, but that didn’t make any sense because where does yellow come from? Everyone knows you can’t make yellow. Right? It’s a primary colour. EVERYONE KNOWS THAT.

WELL GUESS WHAT. Mixing paint and mixing light are not the same at all. RBY are the primary colours when it comes to solids/liquids, like paint, but light is a different story.

I learned this from Lydia’s second Kiwi Crate, which was all about light. It came with lots of cool things, including little finger lights in red, blue and green. Because when it comes to light, the three primary colours are in fact red, blue and green, and you can create yellow by mixing red and green.

WHAT. I could not believe it until I saw it with my own eyes.

Mind = blown.

A few weeks later Lydia noticed the same phenomenon in Felix’s new bubble tube, which we got him for his birthday. The LED lights at the bottom change colours to change the colours of the bubbles; and she noticed that yellow bubbles were created with red and green lights:

I still can’t believe it. My whole life has been a lie.

3. A Cozy Cabin Getaway in Fall is Quite Nice.

If you know me at all, you know that I love summer and hate winter, and resent fall just for being the traitor that leads from one to the other. My idea of the perfect vacation involves sunshine and beaches. I want to be barefoot and sipping a cold beer or iced coffee.

But this year, we didn’t manage to plan an anniversary trip until late October. Ben and I ended up renting a cabin a few hours north of where we live, right on the Georgian Bay.

And guys: it was delectable.

The forests were ablaze with amber and orange. Our daily hikes were made more magical by the presence of falling snowflakes. And I thoroughly enjoyed snuggling up on the cabin couch with my knitting and murder mystery novel.

Maybe fall isn’t so bad after all.

4. You can make ink out of black walnuts and dye with weeds (and beans).

I wrote full posts about both of these things, so I won’t go into detail here. But this year I happened to learn a lot about the pigments available to me in my own neighbourhood for creating my own natural inks and dyes.

If you haven’t already read them, here are my posts:

How to make your own black walnut ink:

How to dye wool with plants:

I never wrote about this, but I also dyed some yarn using black beans! I followed these instructions.

I was going for a blue, but ended up with this lovely lilac colour:

Still cool.

All right, that’s it for now! Hope you’ve been having a good autumn! What did you learn this season?